Courtly Love and Christian Marriage: Chretien de Troyes, Chaucer, and Henry VIII

Christianity and Literature Vol. 59, No.3 (Spring 2010) SPECIAL FEATURE Courtly Love and Christian Marriage: Chretien de Troves, Chaucer, and Henry VIII David Lyle Jeffrey Religious and social satire accounts for a large share of the literature produced in Western culture. Some of it is divertingly jocular and makes its mark by the "send-up;' capturing ironies and apparent hypocrisy in the most solemn forms of observance. One of the earliest examples in my own education, long before I had been exposed to the witticisms of Dryden, Swift, and Pope, was cheerfully recited to me in a basketball locker-room by a teammate: Beware the Protestant minister: his false reason, false creed, and false faith; the foundation stones of his temple are the balls of Henry the Eighth. As a Protestant in a largely Catholic community, this indelicate recitation did little to enhance my already insecure religious identity. That was doubtless the point. Only years later did I learn that the poem was a quip usually attributed the Irish poet Brendan Behan. Literary history typically offers up such wisdom as it has to teach less confidently than does Behan's ditty. It is likewise a commonplace that critical conclusions can on occasion be offered in a fashion flagrantly obverse to probable intentions in the mind of the original authors. Discovery of such disjunctions, however, can be instructive. In this essay I want to discuss the effects of a particular instance of dispositional bias that more or less unconsciously (rather than as a species of critical refashioning of a deliberately interested sort) failed to grasp the ironic character of a Author's Note: This essay was first delivered in November 2008 as a lecture at a conference on Marriage and the Family at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. 515 516 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE significant body of texts. Specifically, I want to draw attention to evidence that "courtly love" in the Middle Ages was pretty much always a literary convention of sorts, a vehicle for political and social satire, in that the very rules of this party game depended on an undergirding high value for the normative principles of Christian marriage. Even the jokes of this genre (and there are many) depend on security in the assumption that fruitful Christian marriage was the glue upon which social stability and cohesion depended, perhaps most especially at the courtly level. "Courtly Love" as a Social Construct One might not easily grasp the ironic frisson to which I refer from the fantasies of Victorian medievalists. The soft erotic realism of the PreRaphaelite painters exemplifies one obvious register: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix" (1863), Sir Edward Burne-Jones's"The LoveSong" (1877), or, in the second generation, Sir Frank Dicksees "End ofthe Quest" (1921) and "Chivalry" (1885) along with John Collier's "Tannhauser in the Venusburg" (1901) are all examples of a romanticized aesthetic reconstruction of the ethical legacy of medieval culture. Alluring as they are, these depictions bear no more correspondence to their ostensible prototypes in historical fact than in historically plausible costume, or, in many cases, lack ofcostume (Palmgren and Holloway; Waithe). I do not mean to suggest that blithe falsifications of history and plain sense are entirely without value. A complete incapacity for irony, coupled with an appalling ignorance of the actual anthropology out of which a text is written, has often led to interpretation much more entertaining than the text itself. One literary critic whose place in the history of medieval literary study has been more assured by this dubious sort of fantasia than by his better work is the nineteenth-century French medievalist, Gaston Paris. In an inventive essay on Chretien de Troyes' Lance/ot du Lac (1883) he introduced the term amour courtois to describe the illicit, secret, demeaning, and ultimately disastrous love of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.' In this relationship, which Gaston Paris tellingly described as "a kind of idolatry:' Lancelot's first article offaith is in the goddess-like superiority of his mistress; the great knight grovels before her most trivial requests for feats by which he may hope to prove his undying ardor. Now the frank objective of this most famous "courtly...